Look What They’ve Done to My Beautiful Country

(This is yet another letter (5/4/2025) to the editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel that was not published. This time, however, they teased me with their standard E-mail message that starts “We are considering publishing your letter….Please [re-] provide the following information….” I waited for several weeks and finally had to conclude that they weren’t going to publish it after all. Nothing personal, perhaps: they didn’t publish any letters to the editor from anyone. However, they did have various op-eds provided by VIPs (like elected officials) and other movers and shakers that they perhaps invited to send in something. As usual, we little people have no role to play in the discussion of local, state, and national politics in our local newspaper. It is very big on sports, though, so if that’s what interests you, they are speaking to you.)

My beautiful country – look what they’ve done to it!

We weren’t perfect, but we exemplified the ideals of tolerance and caring about the less fortunate. We helped the world feed their hungry, recover from disasters, and fight awful diseases. Inside the country, we supported many programs to do the same for our own people, from Head Start to Meals on Wheels. Not any more.

Our economy, “the envy of the world”, is now being wrecked by a cockamamie idea disproved back in the days of Smoot and Hawley. Our strong medical research and monitoring programs have been gutted. Our free speech protections are treated as unimportant in the name of protecting Trump or allowing him to take personal revenge for long-past offenses.

Nincompoops are in charge of our national defense and foreign relations, a gang of haters in charge of our immigration approach. Our strong moral sense about war and its victims has been set aside – because Mr. Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, whether it is for settling the Hamas-Israel war, with the poor Palestinians caught in the middle, or for settling the Russia-Ukraine war, with the poor Ukrainians being thrown to the wolves. ICE dementors are snatching up people and sending them to Azkaban – er, El Salvador. Due process, a pillar of democracy, is inapplicable if your skin isn’t the right color and your last name has strange syllables.

This is so not what people voted for. This is Covid by other means: a terrible disease that is racking our country.

But our resistance is strong. People are fighting for our democracy, the courts are upholding the rule of law, and, I hope, at long last Congress will impeach Trump and end our long national nightmare.